To Pair, or Not to Pair

Most Agile teams learn the ceremonies and other Agile jargons sooner than we could imagine.They add few meetings to their project execution and talk in a fancy language that would make us believe in Agile utopia. Everything seems fine and happy, until one day their happy bubble bursts and they realize that they are just 'doing' Agile and not 'being' Agile. One primary culprit here is that the teams often neglect their core technical practices and don't challenge their status quo. Which means they don't change anything about the way they design, code or test but just modify their management processes and await a miracle. There are three primary reason why we observe this Agile smell in most teams. It is believed that there are no immediate results in modifying these practices, its is hard to change the existing practice because of umpteen man-made reasons and finally no one knows where to begin their journey.

Here in this talk I would like to address the third challenge and explain how a (non-technical) coach could pair with the team members on their day-to-day activities and help them initiate this journey. The focus of this presentation is on the do's and don'ts while pairing with the team members. It will also explain the benefits of this exercise.

Public Feedback

Karthik - pairing is a reasonably mainstream topic - those convinced are doing it, those not convinced might not be convinced by a talk alone. Do you have data to prove the ROI of basic feedback loop efficacy or any other tangible measure of its impact on a team's performance? In the absence of any specific data, we might be looking at a talk that might not interest the typical Agile India attendee (as seen from the past experiences about their general awareness of agile methods).

Karthik - can you respond back on some of the queries from me and Doc. We believe there might be an opportunity to share your experiences in a 20 minute experience report. If you are ok with it, can you make changes to your proposal so that review panel could review it and take call?

Sorry about the delay in my response. The idea here is to elaborate on how a (non-technical) coach can influence the team members through pairing to apply Agile ways-of-working at various stages of development. The data I have is in-terms of the survey I did with my previous team. I am also collecting data points with my current team to see if I could provide some tangible outcomes.

As far as the time is concerned, I am cool with 20 minutes too. I think I can scope it down and make it crisp.